As I visit communities around the country and work with local economic developers and elected officials, I find great skepticism focused on my insistence that we need minimum acceptable bandwidth of 100 megabits per second to every home and business. These officials often scoff at the notion that their citizens will ever need that kind of bandwidth, and the example they often cite is elderly people in their community, who "will never need that kind of bandwidth."
Uh huh. Accenture is busy designing a new home to home video system that allows family members in different locations to enjoy meals together. The three essential ingredients are High Definition cameras, HD flat panel monitors, and a high performance broadband connection between the two locations. A single channel of high quality HD video requires 18 to 20 megabits per second each way, for a total of about 40 megabits per second.
This kind of system is well beyond the capacity of DSL and cable modem systems, can't run at all on WiFi, and would overwhelm the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) being rolled out by the phone companies.
Once in production, these systems are expected to sell for $500 to $1000, and have great promise in telehealth for the elderly. Regular contact with distant family members and with health care professionals promises to delay moving some older people into assisted living facilities or nursing homes for months or years, making the systems a real bargain--the typical monthly cost for assisted living or a nursing home is upwards of $3000 per month.
Is your community attracting retired people because of the good quality of life? These folks are prime candidates for this kind of system in a few years, and high capacity, affordable broadband is needed. High performance broadband is going to change our lives in many small and large ways, and communities need to invest in the right kinds of open service provider networks to ensure that their citizens and businesses have the right kind of broadband.
Economic development bonus: There will be lots of business opportunities for local entrepreneurs to install and maintain these new kinds of systems--if the community has the right infrastructure in place to support them.